Chapter 1 the HISTORY of COCKTAILS and MIXED DRINKS "Variety''s the very spice of life, That gives it all its flavour." -William Cowper, The Task, Book II, "The Time-Piece," 1785 There''s nothing quite like a good cup of tea. But do you prefer Earl Grey, Assam, Keemun, Lapsang souchong, jade oolong, Formosa oolong, or Ti Kuan Yin? Or perhaps English Breakfast is more your cuppa. And how do you take your tea? Plain and strong or with milk and sugar, a slice of lemon, a teaspoon of honey, a tot of whiskey, or a good measure of dark rum? One drink with myriad variations, all dependent on the taste of the consumer. And so it is, and always has been, with mixed drinks: The base ingredient can be consumed neat, but it can also be enhanced by the addition of one or more other ingredients. Why do people choose to adulterate fine wines, beers, and spirits? For variety''s sake. It''s the very spice of life. It''s more than possible that the world''s first mixed drinks were created in order to mask the bad flavors of the base ingredient.

Alcoholic potions of our dim and distant past were far inferior to the technologically clean products we enjoy today. Archaeological evidence shows that the ancient Egyptians used dates and other fruits to flavor their beer, and that Wassail, a spiced drink originally made with a base of hard cider, dates back to pagan England-it was served to celebrate a bountiful apple harvest. We also know that the Romans drank wine mixed with honey and/or herbs and spices. The practice could have arisen from the inferior quality of the wine, but it probably also had roots in the medicinal, restorative, or digestive qualities attributed to the various ingredients. Mulled wine and spiced beer date back thousands of years and are still enjoyed in the twenty-first century. In order to see how the cocktails and mixed drinks of more modern times came into being, it''s necessary to start in the 1600s, when taverns in New England were serving some creative concoctions. Sack Posset was a mixture of ale, sack (sherry), eggs, cream, sugar, and spices such as nutmeg and mace that was boiled over an open fire, sometimes for hours at a time. When the quaffers wanted their ale hot but didn''t want to leave it on the fire, they would use a type of poker, known as a loggerhead, that was heated in the fire and then plunged into the tankard of ale.

If a fight broke out in the tavern, these pokers could be used as weapons-the fighters were "at loggerheads" with each other. It''s possible that there were more than a few fights in seventeenth-century taverns, too-the colonists didn''t drink in short measure. One description of the daily drinking habits of southern colonists states that they started their day with mint-flavored whiskey, stopped work at 11:00 a.m. in order to partake of slings, toddies, or flips, drank whiskey or brandy with water before and during dinner, and finished their day with a whiskey or brandy without water. But overconsumption wasn''t tolerated by all the colonists: In seventeenth-century Connecticut, for example, it was illegal to drink for more than thirty minutes at a time, or to down more than a half bottle of wine at one sitting. And if you dined at the Ship Inn in Boston circa 1634, you would have been allowed no more than one cup of wine with dinner. Among the drinks consumed during the 1700s are mulled wines, sherry sweetened with fruit (such as raspberries), and juleps.

We''re not sure whether these were the Mint Juleps familiar to us today since, according to Richard Barksdale Harwell, author of The Mint Julep, mention of such a drink wasn''t recorded until 1803. All sorts of other mixed or flavored drinks were popular with the early colonists, and some of them, such as Toddies, Slings, and an assortment of punches and mulled wines, are still made today, though probably not according to recipes that our forefathers would recognize. Other drinks that cropped up in America around this time bear names that recall some of the cocktails we drink today. A potion called Mimbo was merely rum and sugar; Stonewall was a mixture of rum and cider; Black-Stripe was made of rum and molasses; a Stewed Quaker was hard cider with a baked apple dropped into it; and one drink, made from simmered sour beer sweetened with molasses and thickened with crumbs from brown bread, had the wonderful moniker of Whistle-Belly-Vengeance. Early American Beverages, by John Hull Brown, details a New York City restaurant built in 1712 and known as Cato''s Road House. Cato was a slave who had bought his freedom, opened his own joint, and sold New York Brandy Punch, South Carolina Milk Punch, and Virginia Eggnog to accompany dishes such as terrapin, curried oysters, fried chicken, and roast duck. Our first president, George Washington, was known to be fond of a drink or two, and sometimes more. He indulged in thirteen toasts-one for each state-during a victory celebration at New York''s Fraunces Tavern, and it''s said that after he partook of Fish House Punch at one of Philadelphia''s fish club''s, State in Schuylkill, he couldn''t bring himself to make an entry in his diary for the following three days.

There''s even a loose connection to Washington and Grog, the mixture of rum and water that Britain''s Admiral Edward Vernon introduced to sailors in 1740. Lawrence Washington, George''s half brother, served under Vernon and admired him so much that he named his estate for him. Later, of course, George became the chief resident at Mount Vernon. By the end of the 1700s people in the newly formed United States were still tippling far more alcohol than we''d tolerate today; it''s important to remember that at the time, alcohol was seen not only as a social drink but also as a medicine that would stave off, or maybe even cure, all manner of illnesses. John Brown, a medical professor at the University of Edinburgh in the mid-eighteenth century, prescribed liquor for many ailments. When one of his patients had the audacity to die, Brown simply opened up his body and declared the organs to be "fresh," which was proof that his "medicine" had been working. This, no doubt, was sufficient evidence to encourage a party of eighty people at Boston''s Merchant''s Club to down 136 bowls of punch, 21 bottles of sherry, and a "large quantity" of cider and brandy during a dinner in 1792. The eighteenth century also saw Americans become enamored of iced drinks, something that wouldn''t gain favor in Europe for another two hundred years.

European immigrants to these shores, unused to the hot summers in America, created a demand for ice from the frozen north to be brought down to the people in the sweltering south. Initially ice was fairly expensive and out of financial reach for many people, but prices gradually dropped, and by the mid-1800s iced drinks were the norm. While ice was becoming popular, though, something else happened behind a bar in America that would change the face of mixed drinks forever: At some point close to the year 1800, somebody created the world''s first cocktail. THE BIRTH OF THE COCKTAIL On May 13, 1806, the Balance and Columbian Repository of Hudson, New York, answered a reader''s query as to the nature of a cocktail: "Cocktail is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters-it is vulgarly called a bittered sling." The cocktail had been born, it had been defined, and yet it couldn''t have been very well known by the general populace, or the newspaper wouldn''t have considered it a fit topic for elucidation. Where does the word cocktail come from? There are many answers to that question, and none are really satisfactory. One particular favorite story of mine, though, comes from The Booze Reader: A Soggy Saga of a Man in His Cups, by George Bishop: "The word itself stems from the English cock-tail which, in the middle 1800s, referred to a woman of easy virtue who was considered desirable but impure. The word was imported by expatriate Englishmen and applied derogatorily to the newly acquired American habit of bastardizing good British Gin with foreign matter, including ice.

The disappearance of the hyphen coincided with the general acceptance of the word and its re-exportation back to England in its present meaning." Of course, this can''t be true since the word was applied to a drink before the middle 1800s, but it''s entertaining nonetheless, and the definition of "desirable but impure" fits cocktails to a tee. Another theory has it that in England, horses of mixed blood had their tails docked to signify their lack of breeding, and were known as cocktailed horses. This is true, and since the cocktail comprises a mixture of ingredients, it makes sense that the term could have come from this source; but it''s somewhat of a stretch. A delightful story, published in 1936 in the Bartender, a British publication, details how English sailors of "many years ago" were served mixed drinks in a Mexican tavern. The drinks were stirred with "the fine, slender and smooth root of a plant which owing to its shape was called Cola de Gallo which in English means ''Cock''s tail.'' " The story goes on to say that the sailors made the name popular in England, and from there the word made its way to America. Another Mexican tale about the entomology of cocktail-again, dated "many years ago"-concerns Xoc-tl (transliterated as Xochitl and Coctel in different accounts), the daughter of a Mexican king, who served drinks to visiting American officers.

The Americans honored her by calling the drinks cocktails-the closest they could come to pronouncing her name. And one more south-of-the-border explanation for the word can be found in Made in.